The Public Square for January 2025

Attention Citizens: I’ve decided to start a little newsletter!

On the 15th of every month, I’ll be sending a newsletter to everybody on Patreon at the $1 tier level or above.  Every quarter, I’ll be making the same newsletter available for free on both Patreon and the Mailing List, starting today, with…this!

I’ve thought about doing a newsletter for a long time, but in 2025, it’s finally happening.  

I’m doing this for 2 big reasons.  

The first is that I’m increasingly pessimistic when it comes to all forms of social media.  I’m off of Facebook, I’m off of Instagram, I’m off of TikTok, I’m off of Reddit, and now, I’m off of Twitter.  Rather than force myself back onto of these platforms for crass promotional reasons, (yuck,) I thought that going forward, it might be better to directly control the means of communication with the audience.  That way, I wouldn’t be holding my nose and holding myself back every time I posted on one of the many Bad Websites.  Viola, newsletter.  

My second reason for doing this is that Patreon is making some business-sided changes this year.  Over the course of 2025, they’re forcing all creators who get paid for every new creation (like me!) to switch over to getting paid every month.  

To be perfectly clear, I’m not happy about this change.  One of the reasons I signed up for Patreon in the first place was that they allowed for this more casual model where you only charge people when you have something new to show them.  Doing things the other way makes it feel way more like a j-o-b.  That sucks.  But they’re forcing everybody to switch over to a monthly model, and so I will be making that change later this year.  

One of the problems with a monthly model is that it incentivizes people to churn out high-volume/low-effort art on a monthly or even weekly basis.  I hate that.  It’s anti-creative if you ask me.  YouTube incentivizes the same thing, every incentive structure pushes you towards putting out more and more mid-tier videos.  In fact, this is a problem everywhere.  Anything run by an algorithm has the unintended side effect of producing a large volume of mediocrity.  In my opinion.  

So, Patreon is going to force me to switch to a monthly subscription model, but I’m stubborn so that’s not going to stop me from working at my own pace and posting whenever I damn well please.  Because to do anything else would be anti-creative.  But taking into account my ever-increasing rejection of most forms a social media, I thought that it might be a good opportunity to have some more interaction with the audience on a monthly basis.

It’s important to me that nothing distracts from the main project, which is putting out high-quality educational videos.  Or, if not high-quality, at least high-effort.  So, in my opinion, low-effort videos would be a distraction and a waste of time.  But a low-effort newsletter?  That’s not a distraction, that’s easy, so that’s what I’ll be doing going forward.

Progress Update:

For the last couple of weeks I’ve mostly been working on Video #89, which is kind of a sequel to the “Work.” video that I posted in September 2023.  When I finished that video I had a lot of left over research that I never ended up using, so for the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to flesh that out into its own video.  I think I have enough to proceed, but I’m not sure… I may need to read one more book… so I’m leaving it at 80% Research on the ol’ website for now.  

For the rest of January I’ll be leaving Video #89 and moving back to Video #88, which is a big, bloated, ever-expanding mess.  Every time I touch the script for this video it seems to get substantcially longer, which is good in the sense that I clearly have a lot to say, but bad in the sense of…I put a bunch of work into it and it’s no closer to being finished.  So the job for the next couple of weeks is to try to nail down the structure with a beginning, middle, and end, so that the script stops growing.  

I’ll probably have more to say about Video #88 next month.    

Books I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• The City in History, by Lewis Mumford

  • I’ve been spending a lot of time going through this book and making detailed notes, it’s going to be important for Video #89.  Mumford wrote this in 1961, he’s Mad About Cities and Mad About Capitalism in a way that’s pretty refreshing and interesting.  And obviously these two things have only gotten better since 1961.  Solved, actually.  I’ll probably end up going back to this book a lot whenever I write up that sequel to the Work video.  

• Watchmen, by Alan Moore

  • I re-read Watchmen in the New Year and, surprise surprise, it’s actually excellent?  I looked up when I had last read it, and to my complete horror it was 15 years ago, and I hadn’t much thought about it since.  One of the interesting things about revisiting it after 15 years is realizing that the whole damn thing is about aging, and about the world kind of passing you by and spinning out of your control.  I definitely didn’t clock that the first time I read it.  This time, I could very clearly feel Moore rudely calling the readers a bunch of Dan Dreibergs.  

Films I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• The Wizard of Oz

  • Over the holidays I had been going back and re-reading some Joseph Campbell for fun, bits of The Hero With a Thousand Faces.  This got me in the mood for The Wizard of Oz, which is kind of the perfect example of Campbell’s hero’s journey in every way.  Campbell famously inspired Lucas when he wrote Star Wars, but I think that Oz maps even more cleanly onto his formula than Star Wars does.  Fun.

Albums I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• Station to Station, by David Bowie

  • For some reason I’ve been listening to Station to Station on repeat, which is Bowie’s most (???) drug-fuelled album from 1976.  I think I remember reading that he was so far gone that he became hyper-fixated on the colour white.  Would only eat white food.  Would only take white drugs.  Created the Thin White Duke persona for the album.  Also like… occult stuff.  He was totally gone.  Golden Years has been on repeat for most of January, which Bowie wrote for Elvis like a year before his death, but Elvis turned him down.  I always assumed that it was because it’s kind of a dark song, but if the songwriter was a halucinating drug addict it probably didn’t help.  And speaking of which, TVC15 is a mostly nonsense song about watching TV while on drugs, and somehow it’s an absolute banger.

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